When you buy a book, you can loan it to anyone – a judge says libraries can’t
thenation.com
thenation.com
The CDL issue with the IA has been litigated multiple times on this forum by now, and the consensus seems to be that publishers weren't going to do anything about CDL until the IA started freely distributing digital copies in the early stages of the Covid pandemic. As someone who reads, I strongly support what the IA is doing, but as someone who produces content, I also want some way of controlling its usage. I wish the author would take a more nuanced approach to this topic rather than misconstruing reality to make the other side seem unreasonable.
Nobody at this point is making an argument in favor of uncontrolled lending. And the judge is arguing against controlled lending.
> ...any such copy or phonorecord that is reproduced in digital format is not otherwise distributed in that format and is not made available to the public in that format outside the premises of the library or archives.
My understanding is that controlled digital lending is its own thing, with its own procedures and licenses. What IA did here was come up with its own controlled digital lending scheme based on ownership of print copies.
This doesn't look like one of those tense cases where judges add to the law with rulings that involve reading in-between the lines. This looks like a case where the judge read the law, saw that the law discussed exactly what the defendent did, and so ruled according to the law.
This seems 1) at odds with the point of a library and 2) a death knell for CDL.
Assuming that is the correct interpretation, then the law is pretty obnoxious in terms of preventing libraries from format shifting their collections from physical to digital.
It doesn't seem like good public policy to:
1) Try to make digital copies less portable and usable than their physical counterparts
2) Prevent libraries from converting their physical - or digital - lending collections from one format to another
Depends. One of them is about an end-user action, one of them is about another publisher getting into distribution of the work.
They may involve the same technology (especially in 2023), but they are not the same action at all, which is a substantial part of the TFA.
I've seen that argument here many times, but I don't think it's true. It may have accelerated the lawsuit, but it was inevitable. IA was likely just going to buy more and more copies of books and lend them out digitally.
> An ebook recast from a print book is a paradigmatic example of a derivative work.
In other words, if a library buy a book, they can't just digitise it and share it without permission.
The author spends an enormous amount of time explaining how the rights of "end users" have been cemented, such as the right to change formats. If a consumer lends a book, they are, by definition, no longer the "end user" and none of that precedent applies.
It's probably true that anyone can lend a book but that's not an "end user" right. In fact, that allowance is the very reason libraries can exist in the first place.
The case and article are about something completely different (making copies, then distributing the copies). Odd headline.
Right to property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_property
I have been a user since 2010 with no issues for the first ten years. Then came the recent update the middle of last year whereby I can no longer lend my books out to my friend, this was a big blow as we used to exchange books we liked.
Recently I have also noticed that the device seems to want to turn on Wi-Fi for me to open books I have downloaded already onto the device which also has sufficient memory to store them, this seems more to be the ones I haven't read for a few months. The final nail in the coffin came a few weeks ago when I wanted to re-read a book I had read and it asked me to purchase it, thinking I must have read it on kindle unlimited which I had subscribed to and cancelled a few years earlier I pressed buy now, after reading it I looked back through my purchase history and found the same book I had bought five years before. Not even sure who to call on this one but prior to this if I owned the book already it just came up with the read-now button not the buy-now!
I am almost certain that sometime in the future if the kindle doesn't phone home after a period the books on it will disappear.
I managed to get some books off it to epub format, but the most recent updates have somehow stopped the program that did that from working.
Bottom line is I love my kindle, but I am only getting epub books, keeping them on the PC and emailing them to the device.
This is almost certainly the publisher's fault, by way of putting up a different listing for the same book. You've probably got two different versions of the book in your library now.
They probably weren't downloaded. My Kindle has been doing this thing for years: it only seems to download enough metadata to show a newly purchased book in the list, but the actual book won't download until I try to read it. I don't know why because it's utterly stupid, I don't know under what circumstances it does this and when it downloads the entire book by itself, it seems to be completely random.
> I managed to get some books off it to epub format, but the most recent updates have somehow stopped the program that did that from working.
And 5 years later companies will whine to the media about evil piracy again.
Sure, there's an exception for "fair use," but I don't think fair use has ever covered making a complete copy of a work and giving it to someone else. And of the four factors judging fair use, the "amount and substantiality of the portion taken" one fails completely here. Doesn't seem surprising.
The problem is that viewing copies that way completely trashes the rights people have for their digital goods. Displaying it is technically a copy. Reselling it is technically a copy. Format shifting is technically a copy. Lending is technically a copy.
If I make an ephemeral copy, and keep the original in a vault the entire time the ephemeral copy is loaned out, that should be good enough. (Maybe you want a minimum loan period, details details, but something that works just like a traditional library shouldn't be illegal for digital assets.)
People don't have any rights to their digital goods. Doesn't exist. They are not.
It is wonderful to discuss ideas for how the system SHOULD be. I 100% support a legislated solution for digital ownership of copies of things, with a right to transfer and so on, but that's sadly a hypothetical discussion about what could be.
Both of which are legally not copyright infringement. Have long settled case history etc.
>Reselling it is technically a copy.
Not really, unless you keep a copy after you sell it.
I 100% agree with you that it should be this way but it should not be surprising that it is not.
YouTube app video downloads work exactly that way, same for prime video, I believe
Nobody to blame here; existing contracts just didn't know what innovations were coming. And business depends upon contracts, like it or not.
Skeuomorphic reductionism has outstayed its welcome on both sides of the debate, I'm afraid.
> The IA maintained that it could, as long as it lent only the same number of copies it owned and locked down the digital copies so that a borrower could not copy or redistribute them.
Let's drop the act and be real here: You cannot lock down digitally distributed files in any way which offers reasonable guarantees that someone remotely sophisticated couldn't copy them.
Considering that, I think its necessary that the publishers and authors have approved and accepted (1) the distribution itself, and (2) the systems which protect the copying of their work. In the digital world, for example: they've generally approved of Kindle as a digital distribution retailer, and they've approved of the Kindle System (DRM, locked down hardware, etc). They clearly did not approve of IA distributing their work, nor I assume did they approve of whatever DRM scheme IA came up to help protect themselves from legal retribution.
(sidenote: the fact that IA put DRM on it at all kind of whispers to me that they knew this lawsuit would be coming, they knew what they were doing had shaky legal foundations, and while I have an immense amount of respect for what they do and their mission, knowingly breaking the law isn't respectable even if you disagree with it).
But step out of the digital world and into the physical one. The same rules apply. Publishers would generally approve of Barns and Noble distributing their books; easy enough. But to the second point, implicitly: Publishers have also accepted the inherent physical laws of our universe which protect, not wholly but significantly, works from being copied at scale. There's no DRM protecting physical books; no swipe of your ID card to unlock them; its just physically hard to copy them, its physically hard to take a book off your shelf and hand it to a friend in-person. When you view those facts relative to how easy it is to copy even DRM-protected eBooks, or how easy it would be to just "send" a digital book to anyone, anywhere on the planet, at any time, instantly; it makes a lot more sense to me why publishers are scared of allowing things like this.
In other words: Applying the metaphor of a physical book to a digital one is a fundamentally misguided action because digital books are fundamentally different in the ways copyright has historically cared about. If a man in Norway messages me and asks to borrow my physical copy of Hunger Games; I'm going to say no. If he asks to borrow my digital copy, all hypothetically handled in Kindle, just enter his email, I can click a button to "get it back" at any time, instantly: I'm going to say Yes.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
> The Publishers task aggregators with ensuring that a library lends its ebooks only to the library’s members. Id. ¶¶ 123, 125. The Publishers also require aggregators to employ approved “digital rights management” (“DRM”) software and other security measures to prevent unauthorized copying or distribution of ebook files. Id. ¶ 126. Demand for library ebooks has increased over the past decade. In 2012, OverDrive, the largest aggregator, processed 70 million digital checkouts of ebooks and audiobooks; by 2020, that number had risen to 430 million. Id. ¶¶ 119, 164.